How India is shaping Facebook’s strategy

Out of around 1.5 billion people who use Facebook every month, 138 million are from India. No wonder Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, chose New Delhi for his first business meeting this year.John Sarkar | TNN | January 12, 2016, 23:25 IST

Out of around 1.5 billion people who use Facebook every month, 138 million are from India. No wonder Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, chose New Delhi for his first business meeting this year.

Cox is part of Facebook’s leadership and leads its product management, design, and marketing functions globally. Cox joined Facebook in 2005 as a software engineer and helped build the first versions of key Facebook features, including News Feed.

He then became director of human resources, where he set the tone for Facebook’s culture and drove the development of its mission, values and people strategy.

Here he talks to TOI about how India is shaping Facebook. Excerpts:

As a company, how do you bind more than 1 billion people every day?Well, it’s a combination of tools we have built up over the last 11 or 12 years. We make sure that in as many possible cultures, we are on the ground – looking over people’s shoulders.

Using, logging in, understanding - oh this word didn’t quite make sense - last name quite didn’t make sense - oh the way you said invalid password I didn’t totally understand what that meant.

At the scale of the billion people, each of these issues is a really big deal. And we need to have a system that lets us go out, understand, prioritize and address each of these product issues.

For instance, we have been working on features for a pocket of Indian women, who were concerned about the privacy of their profile photos. So, we worked with local Indian illustrators, we worked with our translation team here, so that we can get them exactly the right message, at the right time — which would help them say – “Oh okay, now I’m comfortable uploading a profile picture on Facebook”, which until you have done that, you’re not really using Facebook.

The other thing we have done is 2G Tuesdays, today is a Tuesday, so hundreds of FB developers would be prompted to switch the experience they are using today in London or NY to switch to a 2G experience, so their experience is closer to a 2G experience in rural India.

How are users using Facebook and how does Facebook interpret that and design for the future? Would you be able to cite some examples?

It’s interesting, a lot of what we see is just by observing what’s already happening on Facebook. Today, we can discover opportunities today to improve emergent behaviour. Instant Articles is just one examples.

We are seeing more and more people are using Facebook to share or discover news. We know, a lot of these people are in places where news can take more than 30 seconds to load, we know that could be the difference in reading the article or not reading it. Thus was born a team, to make that experience immediate. We know that with video, we need to make sure that video can load quickly, thus was born, auto- play video, which came from observing people watching videos.

We saw people were using groups to buy and sell things. And so, we are working on making commerce in groups easier – building basic feature that let people more easily search and more easily list prices. There are stunning examples in countries like Indonesia, and Mauritius, where massive number of people use Facebook to sell and buy things. In India, again we are learning just how important it is that cricket players know how to use Facebook.

What happened to the ‘dislike’ button?

Reactions, is a feature is getting tested in 5 countries – Phillipines, Ireland, Spain, Portugal. We are really excited about the feature. And we are going to roll out, as soon it’s ready. There’s just this common set of emotions that were being expressed in comments all around the world.

We built this elegant design, where you just press and hold the like button, you get a little menu of animated emotions which you can slide your finger across and leave one of these reactions. And what’s so cool is now when you’re scanning your newsfeed, you’re getting a visceral sense of the feel literally that people are having around a piece of content.

To what extent would you say that Facebook has replaced e-mail?

I think one of the big trend on mobile is that messaging is a massive percentage of what you’re doing on your phone. We really see Facebook and Instagram on one end of the spectrum which is communication with lots of people. And then messenger and WhatsApp on other end of the spectrum which is communicating much more frequently but with a much smaller amount of people.

But all in the spectrum of communication, which is what view is the heart and soul of what Facebook is. So, I think in general, messaging has grown much faster than anybody thought. Making messaging better on mobile phones is an incredibly important trend in technology, over all. It’s not just text messages, its photo messaging and sending video. It’s how we talk, it’s sending voice clips to each other, it’s sending stickers, it’s sending money, it’s all the different ways you express yourself.

I would say that is the thing which is replacing e-mail and is much bigger than Facebook and it’s tied up in the adoption and shift towards mobile as the primary way to compute.

You’re working a lot on user interface on mobile. What is the comparison between desktop and mobile now at Facebook?

Desktop, we still have hundreds of millions of people each day using Facebook on Desktop. So it’s important to not tell the story that desktop is going away, because it’s not. Especially at work, a lot of people are using personal computers.

We are working on a product called - Facebook for Work, which will let you use Facebook specifically with your colleagues. Which is beginning a rollout, got some really good early results and is something where PC is the most important interface. So we are still investing a lot in Desktop. But mobile is the most important technological trend of our time, it is the gateway to the internet for so many people for the very first time

The growth of video as a percentage of growth of content on Facebook?We have 8 billion views a day, and you can look back to see how quickly that’s grown. What’s so exciting for us is working very closely with content creators and publishers to make sure that they have a really good experience in bringing their content on Facebook. That’s where we have a ton of room ahead on tools like managing content moderation and making sure that your content isn’t getting copied and stuff like that.

We are doing work with helping partners monetize, we are doing work on making suggestive videos better. Videos has been an explosive trend for us on Facebook. All around the world and in India. And this is a place, we will continue investing in, aggressively.

How much will you say, India is shaping Facebook?

More and more, every day. For me, an important message to send to my team was that I’m starting my year here in Delhi. And more and more of our engineers are spending time on Android phones than on iPhones, on 2G connections than on 4G connections, working with Indian publishers rather than American publishers. And just sort of broadening our understanding of what’s happening here.

Even in the developer community, we are doing more and more work. FB Start is a program now giving out 20 million dollars in India, we are starting to see adoption of a lot of our tools by Indian entrepreneurs.

I think 75% of the volume of the top grossing apps in India use FB log-ins. And we know there’s a lot more we can do. A lot of our top employees are coming from Indian universities. And in so many ways, India is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the landscape of what we do and we use our phones. And that’s a big thing for us.